Jake Gyllenhaal played Georges Seurat in the limited run of Sunday in the Park with George.PHOTO BY MATTHEW MURPHY.

There was a significant buzz around the New York City Center’s Gala in October 2016 when movie star Jake Gyllenhaal took on the leading role of Georges Seurat in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George. He had performed as Seymour for City Center’s Encores! presentation of Little Shop of Horrors in July 2015, so it was evident he could sing. He’s well known for his expressive, charismatic acting; he was nominated for a 2005 Academy Award for his sensitive performance as Jack Twist in Brokeback Mountain and garnered much acclaim playing creepy videographer Louis Bloom in 2014’s Nightcrawler. But could he handle the vocal demands of the musical’s portrait of pointillist painter Georges Seurat, so long identified with its originator, Mandy Patinkin?

Reviews were extremely positive, and the demand for tickets for the brief presentation, staged by Sara Lapine (James Lapine’s niece), demonstrated an appetite for a longer run. A 10-week limited engagement was set for Feb. 23-April 23, 2017. After 11 previews, the minimally staged production had 61 performances at Broadway’s recently renovated 970-seat Hudson Theatre, recouping its investment a few days before closing. Many of the City Center cast members were in the 23-actor ensemble at the Hudson, including Tony Award winner Annaleigh Ashford as George’s muse Dot and his grandmother Marie in Act II.

The cast of Sunday in the Park with George at New York City’s Hudson Theatre (February-April 2017).PHOTO BY MATTHEW MURRAY

Two more Tony winners Robert Sean Leonard (as Jules/Bob) and Ruthie Ann Miles (as Frieda/Betty), were joined by several others with Tony nominations on their résumés: Brooks Ashmanskas, Phillip Boykin and Penny Fuller. Music director Chris Fenwick continued to serve as conductor, using Michael Starobin’s original orchestrations, expanded slightly from the nine players at City Center to 11.

The limited run at the Hudson was extremely successful, but it came and went quickly. Now there’s good news. Immediately after closing, the cast headed into a New York studio to record the show on April 25-26, 2017. The recording was released digitally on Sept. 22, 2017, by the new Arts Music Division of Warner Music Group; the CD version will be available on Dec. 8. For CD orders and other streaming and purchase options, go to this site.

Even if you love the original cast recording from 1984 which clocked in at 69 minutes, you might want this one for your collection with 10 minutes additional of music, including the accompaniment for “Chromolume No. 7” in Act II, as well as several spoken scenes. It’s a wonderful representation of Sondheim’s score and Lapine’s book. Fenwick conducted again (Mark Michaels served as associate conductor), and the orchestra was enlarged to 18 for the recording.

Annaleigh Ashford as Dot and Jake Gyllenhaal as George.PHOTO BY MATTHEW MURRAY

Interpretations of the leading roles by Gyllenhaal and Ashford will cause Sondheim aficionados to listen carefully all over again to this exquisite and thought-provoking work, one of the few musicals to win the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for drama. Both performers use more naturalistic approaches to the roles than their illustrious predecessors. Gyllenhaal’s George is still self-absorbed, but not so coldly obsessive. In fact, he gets beyond “the usual leave-me-alone attitude” (noted by Ben Brantley in the New York Times) and brings a sad, sympathetic intensity to George that differs significantly from Patinkin’s original performance. Gyllenhaal’s tenor vocal range, while not as broad as Patinkin’s, is more than sufficient to carry the role. (Several commentators suggested that he surely had voice lessons in advance of the production’s 10-week engagement.) A video on Gyllenhaal’s Facebook page has him performing “Finishing the Hat” while descends catwalks and wandering through the Hudson’s backstage. It demonstrates his ease and precision with Sondheim’s melodies and lyrics. He brings similar intensity and yearning to the Act II’s George, the artist adrift in the late 20th century.

Annaleigh Ashford was sweet and delectable as Dot.PHOTO BY MATTHEW MURRAY

Meanwhile, Ashford brings sweet, natural warmth to Dot, who is delectable and sly, as well as self-assured enough to “move on” to a new life, even as she regretfully abandons George despite her genuine feelings for him. Ashford’s sense of comic timing adds vivacity to her performance. In Act II she is equally endearing as George’s elderly, droll grandmother Marie, speaking with a gentle Southern drawl.

For a taste of Gyllenhaal and Ashford’s chemistry together, check out the studio recording of “Move On” released to NPR and other media outlets. It’s an ample illustration of the appeal of their performances.

There’s no argument about the virtues of Sunday in the Park’s original production and cast recording, especially performances by Patinkin and Peters. But this new recording has many distinctive and engaging qualities, and some listeners might prefer the natural and poignantly human performances by Gyllenhaal and Ashford. They make Sondheim and Lapine’s magnificent, bittersweet opus about love and art new again. Having a permanent record of this well-received production is something to celebrate.

RICK PENDER is the executive editor and publisher of Everything Sondheim, and the past editor of The Sondheim Review. He has been a local theater critic in Cincinnati for 30 years, and he is a past chair of the American Theatre Critics Association.

Jake Gyllenhaal onstage at the Hudson Theatre in New York City with the orchestra behind him.PHOTO BY MATTHEW MURRAY

Frank Ferrante played Pseudolus and directed Walnut Street Theatre’s Philadelphia production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. PHOTO BY MARK GARVIN

Burt Shevelove informally referred to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, the 1962 Stephen Sondheim musical he co-authored with Larry Gelbart, as “A Scenario for Vaudevillians.” It’s only fitting that an internationally known impersonator of legendary vaudevillian Groucho Marx, Frank Ferrante, would essay the role of Pseudolus for Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia (Sept. 5-Oct. 22, 2017). Did Ferrante supply enough energy and anarchy to keep the show flying? You bet your life.

Ferrante’s delivery of “Pretty Little Picture” and the second-act reprise of “Lovely” sounded the most Groucho-esque, Ferrante drawing extra laughs during the latter by biting one of the Roman columns in an effort to restrain himself. During an audience talkback following the Sept. 17, matinee, Ferrante described what he visually brought to the production, calling the show “a burlesque from which the Marx Brothers and the (Three) Stooges and Phil Silvers all emerged. I love this proscenium arch — it was my idea (…) like we were walking back in time to the ’20s and ’30s with the footlights and the main curtain. We’re celebrating that style. That’s why you see the Stooges and the Marxes and the Milton Berle [turned-foot] walk (…) It’s a tradition that we’re all part of.” Mary Martello, who played Domina, added, “Everything I know I learned from watching I Love Lucy or Bewitched.”

There were also clever visual bits from the Proteans who, when announcing the impending arrival of Miles Gloriosus, performed elaborate comic salutes and hand gestures. One Protean also brandished a Harpo Marx-like horn in “Comedy Tonight,” during which a prosthetic leg popped up. The sight gags helped propel the relentless action of Pseudolus scheming to earn his freedom

The highlight of the Sept. 17 matinee came when Scott Greer, as Hysterium, accidentally called Ferrante “Hysterium.” Ferrante quickly reached out to the first row of the audience, grabbed a Playbill and recited the names of the characters, reassuring the theatergoers with, “One more rehearsal and we’ll be running!”

As the exasperated Senex, Ron Wisniski contributed a voice somewhere between W.C. Fields and Walter Matthau and more than held up his end of the duet “Impossible.” His aside to the audience, “Never fall in love during a total eclipse,” went over particularly well in the aftermath of the Aug. 21, 2017, solar eclipse. Martello as wife Domina — a character who might have easily been portrayed on film by Margaret Dumont — drew solid laughs throughout the show, including Act II’s “That Dirty Old Man” where she alternately strangled and hugged Hysterium.

Nichalas A. Parker played Miles Gloriosus, with the support of the Proteans.PHOTO BY MARK GARVIN

Alanna J. Smith as the breathless and clueless Philia scored with Act I’s “Lovely.” Brandon O’Rourke gave a solid performance as Hero, even though his character had conspicuously less to do in the second act. Bill Van Horn’s Erronius was lovably addled, Greer was appropriately tense as Hysterium, and Fran Prisco proved a worthy Lycus. Ferrante, Greer, Wisniski and Prisco’s “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid” stopped the show — as always. The Walnut Street production should also be noted for its gender- and colorblind casting: One of the Proteans was played by a woman (Jennie Eisenhower), a male dancer (Billy D. Hart) portrayed the courtesan Gymnasia (displaying Michelle Gaudette’s effective choreography) and Miles Gloriosus was played by an African American (Nichalas L. Parker).

Pseudolus (Frank Ferrante) and the girls.PHOTO BY MARK GARVIN

While critics and historians have long associated Sondheim shows with the plotless, “concept” musical, Forum is but one of several works — including West Side Story, Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods — with a heavily plotted libretto. The Philadelphia audience had little trouble following the story thanks in part to Robert Andrew Kovach’s spare scenic design, with the houses of Lycus, Senex and Erronius spaced sufficiently apart onstage. John Daniels’ strong conducting of the 11-member orchestra also complemented the production.

No matter how chaotic the outside world can get, one can always count on Forum’s convoluted plot to satisfyingly resolve itself in time for the final curtain. Ferrante’s expert acting and direction made Philadelphia’s staging a production to remember.

ANDREW MILNER contributed a chapter to Stephen Sondheim: A Casebook (Garland Press, 1997) and regularly wrote book and music reviews for the Philadelphia City Paper for 20 years.

In keeping with the reverse-chronology concept of Merrily We Roll Along, let’s start with the ending. It was gorgeous in Maria Friedman’s production at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston (Sept. 8-Oct. 15, 2017). A sky just this side of black was studded with stars, but even brighter were the ones in the eyes of three aspiring artists waiting to see Sputnik usher in a new world. Young Franklin Shepard (Mark Umbers) sang part of “Our Time” in a voice so soft it was almost inaudible, a hush born of awe. Who could help misting up at his innocence — or at the reappearance of Frank nearly 30 years later, alone, disillusioned and struggling to make sense of his successful but artistically wasted life?

That Frank had already appeared at the beginning of the Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s 1981 show, described in a Huntington publication as “notoriously difficult to direct.” Friedman’s Merrily, first seen at the Menier Chocolate Factor in London in 2012 (and later digitally around the world in its West End transfer), was her debut as a director 20 years after she played Mary in the original British production at Haymarket Theatre. Borrowing the idea of a framing device (but not the same one) from the original Broadway production, she pulled together the nine scenes moving backwards in time into a streamlined, coherent narrative.

In the musical, the lives of Frank, Charley and Mary — first seen in sour middle age — get better as they grow younger. (If only they had known.) And so did this production. The fast-moving first act seemed dutiful but emotionally flat. Then early in the second act something sparked, and by “Bobby and Jackie and Jack” the show had caught fire, burning progressively brighter until the final blackout.

The Huntington production reunited Umbers and Damian Humbley as Charley from the London cast, with Eden Espinosa in place of Jenna Russell as Mary. Umbers played Frank as smooth rather than slick; as “Good Thing Going” makes clear, his tragic character flaw is that he never knows when to stop. Humbley’s Charley was well thought-out but too even-tempered. Singing “Franklin Shepard Inc.” without breaking a sweat, he also never showed the character’s growth over time. Espinosa looked appropriately dumpy but infused her character with verve.

Among the supporting cast, Aimee Doherty’s Gussie was sinuous rather than voluptuous as played by Emily Skinner at the Kennedy Center “Sondheim Celebration” in 2002. Belting the opening-night version of “Good Thing Going,” she strutted like, well, Gypsy Rose Lee (who could have been seen in a Sondheim double-header, since Gypsy was playing almost concurrently at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston). As Beth, Jennifer Ellis almost spat out the lyrics in her Act I “Not a Day Goes By,” bringing to mind Judi Dench’s angry “Send in the Clowns” in 1996 at the National Theater in London. The more hopeful reprise in Act II became Frank and Beth’s wedding vows, with a yearning Mary, ever the third wheel, singing along.

In songs now so familiar and beloved, Sondheim’s shape-shifting motifs came through even more clearly than usual under Matthew Stern’s musical direction: “Good Thing Going” in “There’s not a tune you can hum,” of course, but also “Growing Up” in “The Blob.” (And not just within Merrily: Was it my just imagination, or did I really hear “It was due to arrive/At a quarter to 5,” from Sweeney Todd, in “It’s a Hit”?) It was especially fun to hear “Bobby and Jackie and Jack” in Boston, where the actors had to get the Kennedy accents just right. They did, and the audience approved.

An upstage wall of windows was the focal point of Soutra Gilmour’s sleek rectilinear unit set. Changes of props and Philip S. Rosenberg’s lighting signaled changes of scene, from a New York penthouse overlooking the city skyline to a California beach house glowing softly with light bouncing off water, and various points in between. Most intriguing was what started out as a barely visible circle penciled on a white wall. Filled in with a drawing reminiscent of Sol LeWitt, a court seal and a television studio’s clocks showing the time in world capitals, it served as visual punctuation. (The NBC peacock was another nice touch.) Scene changes were so smooth as to escape notice. The second time a piano appeared, I had to pay close attention to see if it was rolled off or descended down a trap door.

Gilmour also displayed subtle genius in her period costumes, particularly fashion clichés of the 1960s through ’80s, like Mary’s zip-front Icelandic wool jacket, or the knee-high leather boots she never seemed to take off until she wore sandals with a frumpy gold evening dress to the Broadway opening when everyone else was in New York black. Charley’s pristine white sneakers on opening night (at the Alvin Theater, where the original Merrily flopped) marked him as equally clueless.

The beginning of Merrily is not necessarily its ending, and Frank’s introspection at the end of this production suggests the question might be open. Has he learned from his mistakes? Is it just possible that one and one and one can become three again? The stage goes dark, the show ends, and we’ll never know. But the possibility is tantalizing.

DIANE NOTTLE is a New York-based writer on the arts, language and travel. She was an editor at The New York Times for 20 years, specializing in cultural news.

Maria Friedman in performance at 54 Below in Manhattan. PHOTO BY PHIL ROMANO

Does Maria Friedman remind you a little of Barbara Cook? Though her blond hair is a short bob rather than a flowing mane, Friedman seems to be reinventing herself in mid-career just as Cook did in her 50s, and Stephen Sondheim’s music is playing a big part.

From Sept. 19 to 23, 2017, she brought Maria Friedman Sings Sondheim and Bernstein to 54 Below in Manhattan for five performances. Just in from Boston, where she not only directed the Huntington Theater Company’s current Merrily We Roll Along but also performed this solo show as part of the Huntington’s season-opening celebration, Friedman showed no signs of wear. Dressed on opening night in midnight blue with a shawl sparkling like city lights, she pointed out that Sondheim and Bernstein were both “quintessential New Yorkers.”

Friedman is a Sondheim veteran, having played Mary in MerrilyWe Roll Along, been nominated for an Olivier Award as Dot in the 1990 London Sunday in the Park with George and won as Fosca in the 1996 Passion. Originally, she explained, she intended this to be an all-Sondheim show, ending with “Somewhere.” But her musical director, Jason Carr, overruled her: “It’s not Sondheim; it’s Bernstein.” So she decided to do both — logical, considering their collaboration on West Side Story and Bernstein’s centennial year, already starting with a bang.

Carr’s piano overture opened with a few teasing notes from Bernstein’s “Glitter and Be Gay” before romping through Sondheim’s “Comedy Tonight” and “Company,” then back to Bernstein with Candide and “New York, New York.” Once Friedman took the stage, she presented a series of mini-sets on themes including love, loss and New York, segueing seamlessly from one song into another.

Friedman’s “Lonely Town” sounded more West End than Broadway before she slid into a masterly “Another Hundred People,” in which she made a complete journey from innocence to experience, from wide-eyed newcomer — “I want to dress all in black!” — to a New Yorker who knows the score. “In Buddy’s Eyes” (suggesting Friedman would make an admirable Sally Plummer in Follies) was sandwiched between “A Little Bit in Love” and “I Have a Love.” “So Pretty,” a 1968 Bernstein protest song, led into “Take Care of This House” from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — so timely and so chilling — and “Children Will Listen.”

While Friedman often sounded breathy in the early numbers, her voice progressively gained strength through the 85-minute show. Her renderings throughout reminded listeners that acting a song is at least as important as singing it.

Between songs, she told war stories about singing Sondheim on the London stage. She offered her experience with “Getting Married Today” for a Cameron Mackintosh anniversary concert, which, she knew, “If it went catastrophically wrong, that would be understating.” (Apparently it didn’t; she proceeded to sing it wearing a bridal veil, sounding comic rather than desperate, Amy as a New York transplant with a British accent.) Or the time she was Mrs. Lovett in a concert version of Sweeney Todd and clearly heard a woman in the audience ask her companion, “Do you want a bonbon?” And then there was the first time she sang Sondheim for Sondheim himself — “Broadway Baby,” here as a dreamer absolutely sure the dream will come true.

As for that career reinvention: Like so many actresses before her, “I got to a certain age and hit a brick wall,” said Friedman, 56. Now, as a director, she said, “I cast women of a certain age whenever I can.”

After 75 minutes she did end, for the moment, with “Somewhere.” But then she returned — “Prepare to see a middle-aged woman’s humiliation” — to sing all the roles in “Gee, Officer Krupke.” In an effort worthy of Jefferson Mays’ multi-role performance in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, switching off headgear (a Boston Red Sox cap, a British judge’s curly white wig) and voices (nasal teenage Brooklynese, psychiatric German) to match the roles. One last piece of Bernstein, the ever-wistful “Some Other Time,” closed the show. Played offstage to Merrily,” Friedman was last sighted holding court at the bar, still in midnight blue and still sparkling.

DIANE NOTTLE is a New York-based writer on the arts, language and travel. She was an editor at The New York Times for 20 years, specializing in cultural news.

“Come on and kill a president,” the Proprietor (Rob McDougall, right) urges the would-be assassins at Hayes Theatre Company in Sydney. PHOTO BY PHIL ERBACHER

The Hayes Theatre Company in Sydney delivers a riveting, high energy and highly accomplished production of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s 1990 musical Assassins (Sept. 15-Oct. 22, 2017). The political backdrop of the production strongly evokes a Trumpesque universe that is divisive, bizarre, threatening and unpredictable. On the show’s September opening night the Sydney audience gasped then laughed in recognition when the Balladeer sang:

Every now and then the countryGoes a little wrong.Every now and then a madman’sBound to come along.

From the moment the theater doors open and audience members take their seats, the Proprietor is onstage in a director’s chair, engrossed in reading Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal while listening to alt-right commentary on a portable transistor radio. This sets the scene for a Trump backdrop and acts as a prelude to the opening number, “Everybody’s Got the Right.”

The themes in Assassins are timeless and translate well across national boundaries. The individual stories of the assassins (from 1865 and 1981), as well as the collective meanings of their deeds, provoke both introspection and reflection on national dreams, aspirations and myths — whether American, Australian or any other.

Though satirical in tone, the show resonates with concerns that people across the globe now have about violence and terror. Indeed the seeds that create the would-be assassin (or the would-be terrorist) often stem from a similar terrain of disempowerment, frustration and a thirst for revenge. The assassins and their voices in this musical are recognizable — whether on the streets of Charlottesville, the Trump election rallies of 2016 or the agitated far-right marches on the streets of Sydney and Melbourne.

The wayward, diverse characters that inhabit this musical, each with his or her peculiar logic and reason, oscillate between sorrow and stupidity, farce and tragedy, comedy and horror. That’s a challenge for any director undertaking this unconventional show, and Dean Bryant achieves balance brilliantly between the drama and the vaudeville. As the characters fluctuate between the comical and the shocking, Bryant’s careful and slick direction ensures that it doesn’t descend into slapstick or melodrama. The transitions between scenes and within songs and ballads are smooth, fluid and executed with surety and confidence.

David Campbell as John Wilkes Booth in Assassins.PHOTO BY PHIL ERBACHER

There was much anticipation of David Campbell playing John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, and he doesn’t disappoint, giving an impressive performance vocally and dramatically. In this role we see Campbell’s evolution and maturity in another major Sondheim role. American audiences will know him from the New York premiere and cast recording of Saturday Night (2000) in which he played the role of Gene. His previous Sondheim role was as Robert in the Sydney production of Company (2007). As Booth he brings to the role a sense of self-righteous vindictiveness, vanity and the insecurity of a failing alcoholic actor with an exaggerated view of his role in history.

While Campbell well deserves the accolades for his noteworthy performance, equal recognition must be given to the ensemble. Each and every one of them gives a formidable performance. A splendid line-up of vocal richness reverberates throughout the theater and scene after scene as the performers dazzle with their acting, singing and personification of this array of misfits and madmen.

Because of the limited role he plays, we are only given glimpses of Rob McDougall’s lush and commanding baritone voice as the Proprietor. As a would-be poster boy for the NRA, he gives the assassins their weapons, supplies them with ammunition and entices them to “kill a president.” Onstage he exudes a sinister character, fuelling their rage. His delivery of “Everybody’s got the right/To be different./Even though/At times/They go to extremes” is chilling yet operatic.

Maxwell Simon, an exciting new talent making his professional theater debut as the Balladeer, embodies a youthful teen in shorts, sweater, sneakers and guitar-in-hand narrating the stories and following the tradition of Balladeers with songs of hope and optimism. He also interjects and corrects the distortions and falsehoods of the assassins. He powerfully transitions from the cheerful Balladeer to step into the role of Lee Harvey Oswald as a tortured soul, groomed by the other assassins to immortalize himself by shooting President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Such is the power and tension of this scene that it could be imagined in a parallel moment in which Jihadists might brainwash a would-be terrorist to commit a shocking act of vengeance.

Bobby Fox gives the standout performance as Charles Guiteau, the man who assassinated President James Garfield in 1881 when his desperate desire to become the American ambassador to France was ignored. He sports a haircut straight out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the fluttering eye movements of a madman and a bowtie to match. Charming but insane, likable but alarming, he gives a brilliant characterization of Guiteau that rises to even more heights as he mounts the gallows steps singing “I am going to the Lordy” in “The Ballad of Guiteau.”

As Giuseppe Zangara, the failed assassin of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, Martin Crewes gives an intense and stirring portrayal of the Italian immigrant completely disenfranchised and overwhelmed in a new country. He conveys an agonizing combination of physical pain and mental anguish matched by a forceful vocal performance.

Jason Kos as Leon Czolgosz, President William McKinley’s assassin in 1901, is the convincing embodiment of the wistful proletariat foreign worker, speaking with a heavy Polish accent and burdened by an impending fatalism. Inspired by Emma Goldman, effectively played by Laura Bunting, he powerfully articulates and illuminates a political manifesto of a capitalist system that reproduces vast inequalities between the haves and have-nots in a dog-eat-dog world.

The duo of Kate Cole as Sara Jane Moore and Hannah Fredericksen as Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme greatly impress and tantalize as the stoned, ridiculous would-be assassins who shot at President Gerald Ford in 1975. (Fromme had no bullets in her gun!) Their ludicrous machinations generate amusement and awkward laughter from the audience.

Connor Crawford as John Hinckley Jr. gives a compelling portrait of a troubled, brooding and deluded young man, obsessed with young actress Jodie Foster; to win her love in 1981, he decided to shoot President Ronald Reagan. The duet “Unworthy of Your Love,” sung with Hannah Fredericksen, expresses the pain of unrequited love and the deluded mindset of their infatuation with their love objects: Hinckley with Foster and Fromme with mass murderer Charles Manson.

Justin Smith gives a memorable performance as Samuel Byck, the comic/tragic disheveled fast-talking failed assassin who plans to highjack a plane and crash it into the White House to kill President Richard Nixon in 1974. Dressed as Santa Claus, he mesmerizes and captivates the audience with manic pronouncements and tape-recorded messages to Leonard Bernstein.

Assassins does not follow a typical musical theater structure. It is assembled as a revue, a montage of interconnected scenes. It starts with the dreamlike and mechanical sounds of a carnival fairground and covers a range of musical genres including infusions of traditional folk tunes and rhythms of John Philip Sousa and Stephen Foster. Under the musical direction of Andrew Worboys and Steven Kreamer, and blessed with an ensemble of rich, well projected voices, the singing, tempo control and music arrangements are beautifully realized.

Alicia Clements’ carnival-like scenic design for Assassins at the Hayes Theatre Company in Sydney.PHOTO BY PHIL ERBACHER

The set and costume design by Alicia Clements present a rich multitude of colors, lights, fairground props, posters of presidents as shooting targets, merry-go-round, bumper cars and other carnival regalia depicting a surreal world into which the assassins can escape. A retreat from the real world! Complementing Clements’ colorful and detailed sets is effective lighting by Ross Graham who highlights with careful precision the show’s changing movements and moods. On the Hayes Theatre’s small and limited stage, choreographer Andrew Hallsworth sets in motion steps and movements that add coordinated expression and meaning to the stories.

The show climaxes with “Another National Anthem” in which all of the assassins, in a spirit of defiance and unified dissent, lament the American dream that they have been denied:

There’s another national anthem, folks,For those who never win,For the suckers, for the pikers,For the ones who might have been …

Soon after, the lights focus on the Proprietor happily holding up a copy of The New York Post with a triumphal Donald Trump beaming on the front cover. At last their savior has been found. But be careful what you wish for!

Stephen Sondheim once joked that an album of his chart-topping songs would have to be titled Sondheim’s Greatest Hit, since he had only one, “Send In the Clowns.” Hal Prince, the legendary producer and director, has had a few more. Prince of Broadway, the revue that finally had its Broadway opening (Aug. 24, 2017) after five years of financing and creative delays, could have legitimately been subtitled Hal Prince’s Greatest Hits. (It’s set to close on Oct. 29, 2017.)

As a celebration of his seven-decade career, from The Pajama Game (1954) to Prince of Broadway itself, the show was a crowd-pleaser when I saw it on a rainy Saturday night over Labor Day weekend. As an exploration of Prince-Sondheim collaboration that resulted in eight original Broadway musicals — some landmarks, some now cult phenomena — it felt like a lite yet drawn-out version of David Loud’s A Good Thing Going, first presented at the 92nd Street Y in New York City in 2015 and returning to the city on Dec. 4, 2017, for a sold-out performance at Kaufman Music Center’s Merkin Concert Hall.

Directed by Prince, with Susan Stroman as co-director and choreographer, the show might be considered a companion piece to the Roundabout Theater Company’s 2010 Sondheim on Sondheim, now making the rounds in a concert version. (In July 2017 it played at Tanglewood and the Hollywood Bowl.) There Sondheim comments on his life and work on video; here the nine cast members stood in for Prince, one by one reciting his reflections.

That, and the sort-of not-quite chronological order of three-dozen songs from Prince musicals, was the extent of the book by David Thompson, who let the numbers speak for themselves. One minute Emily Skinner was recounting Prince’s first meeting with Sondheim at South Pacific; the next, their partnership had begun with West Side Story. The logic of some segues was elusive. A lively “You’ve Got Possibilities” from It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman (1966) led straight into Follies, perhaps because of the need to assemble a Loveland-like set for “Beautiful Girls” behind the comic-book curtain.

Audience members arrived in the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Freidman Theater to find a now-commonplace empty stage, furnished with a ghost light and lots of pulleys. “Broadway Baby” led off the overture arranged by music supervisor Jason Robert Brown (whose Parade was among the Prince productions represented in the show). To purists, it was jarring to hear snippets of Sondheim songs interspersed with those of other composers, as in the mini-mashup of “Maria” and “Evita.” Yet the show served as a reminder that there’s a lot more to Prince than just Sondheim, from Damn Yankees to Kiss of the Spider Woman. Projected titles of his shows were truly impressive, both in number and in execution as they floated in the air seemingly without touching the scrim. Beowulf Borritt’s set and projection designs also included subtle bands of light on a drop of the Cotton Blossom that kept “Ol’ Man River” from Prince’s 1994 revival of Show Boat visibly rolling along.

The quick shifts from one show to another meant quick changes for the actors as well. In the early scenes it seemed as if they might never truly become their characters, as opposed to just singing their songs. Then came Follies, and Karen Ziemba brought Sally to life, as Skinner did Phyllis. Later Ziemba traded in her normally bubbly persona for world-weariness and ultimately conviction as Fraulein Schneider in “So What?” from Cabaret.

Michael Xavier’s Frederik in “You Must Meet My Wife,” from A Little Night Music, was a hyper-accented British twit, perhaps a misguided homage to Jeremy Irons in the role at New York City Opera in 2003. While following suit with the accent, Skinner’s Desirée was far more successful in “Send In the Clowns,” ravishingly accompanied by 15-musician orchestra conducted by Fred Lassen.

In another disconnect, the show moved from there into Fiddler on the Roof with Chuck Cooper (Ben Stone in Follies just two scenes before) as Tevye. The shape-shifting Cooper later sang “Ol’ Man River” a good octave higher than Paul Robeson or William Warfield ever did, and Sweeney Todd’s “My Friends” to Ziemba’s convincing Mrs. Lovett.

The second act opened with Company, in which three-and-a-half couples serenaded Bobby on his birthday. Beyond a short blond wig, Skinner made no attempt to channel Elaine Stritch in “The Ladies Who Lunch,” offering a softer Joanne, but her “Ah-h-h-h-h-’ll drink to that!” came out as a primal scream. Later Skinner gave an incisive “Now You Know,” from Merrily We Roll Along.

Throughout, Stroman’s choreography was largely unobtrusive — except when it wasn’t. Brandon Uranowitz’s “Tonight at 8” from She Loves Me” borrowed heavily from Gene Kelly’s twirl around a lamppost in Singin’ in the Rain. Tony Yazbeck, playing Follies’ Buddy as a hoofer, turned “The Right Girl” into a tap extravaganza, most effective (as Eleanor Powell so memorably proved) when the steps were small, quick and light. For those who experienced 1970 firsthand, Ziemba’s Swim and Jerk moves for Company rang a delightful bell.

After an obligatory three-song nod to The Phantom of the Opera that felt as tired as the show itself, now in its 30th year, Prince of Broadway closed with a new song by Brown, “Do the Work.” It summed up Prince’s philosophy — take a chance, find your voice, tell the story — and the audience lapped it up.

The hardcore Sondheim crowd, though, would have found its takeaway early in the show in one of Prince’s reflections: “Never confuse hits and flops with success and failure.” Who knows that better?

DIANE NOTTLE is a New York-based writer on the arts, language and travel. She was an editor at The New York Times for 20 years, specializing in cultural news.

Both New York City Center’s Encores! series and its near contemporary, Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, have appreciated in value and estimation since their premieres in the early 1990s. The mission of Encores! was to give obscure or overlooked musicals new life in one-week runs of semi-staged concert versions. In the early days, that meant actors on book (rehearsal time was also just a week) mostly standing at microphones, with minimal blocking. Over the years Encores! productions — among them Sondheim’s Follies (2007), Anyone Can Whistle (2010) and Do I Hear a Waltz? (2016) — have become more and more fully staged. Seven have moved to Broadway, including Chicago (still running 21 years later) and the multiple Tony Award winner Gypsy, featuring Patti LuPone (2008).

The Assassins produced (July 12-15, 2017) for the fifth season of Encores! Off-Center, the summer offshoot now in its fifth season, was in part a throwback to those early days. More a song cycle than a book musical, Assassins lends itself to such treatment better than most musicals, and Anne Kauffman’s production, like most at Encores!, was right on target.

As in the old days, the audience arrived to find the curtain up and a row of nine floor microphones downstage. Behind each, suspended from a lighting grid, was a target whose bull’s-eye was a 3D pistol — or in one case, a rifle. The orchestra was placed above black curtains upstage through which the targets disappeared as, one by one, the assassins took down their weapons during “Everybody’s Got the Right.” After the opening number, actors carried their microphones off and on, which sometimes worked to advantage — as when Victoria Clark, unusually funny as Sara Jane Moore, ran offstage for hers when she realized she had forgotten it — but undercut the emotion of “Something Just Broke.”

This production was blessedly free of high-tech effects. The only GIFs in sight were at a lobby kiosk, where ticketholders were invited to make their own, a concession, perhaps, to the amusement-park setting of the off-Broadway original. Cutout portraits of presidential victims served as later targets, or in Ronald Reagan’s case dummies that popped up like Whack-a-Moles, spouting Reaganisms, for John Hinckley (Steven Boyer) to miss. Much as red light or blood often underscores the killings in Sweeney Todd, bursts of white light signaled gunshots followed by mug shots, front and profile.

A program note cautioned, “This production is being presented as a concert performance in which the actors may be performing with their scripts in hand.” Actors on book are a rarity at Encores! these days, generally limited to last-minute replacements. For most of Assassins, Clifton Duncan, superb as the Balladeer, was the only cast member to carry a script, although he was never caught sneaking a peek. Then, in “Another National Anthem,” all the assassins cast came out on book, looking like a choir until they ganged up on the Balladeer and drove him offstage.

Whether acting as the voice of reason or turning away in pain at John Wilkes Booth’s racial epithet describing Abraham Lincoln, Duncan (who is African-American) was a standout in a near-flawless cast. To the role of Booth, Steven Pasquale brought a total concentration that would have done credit to Georges Seurat. It paid off in effortless intensity; his moving rendering of “The country is not what it was” was so soft, and so filled with regret. Intensity was also the word for Erin Markey’s Squeaky Fromme, who looked straight into other characters’ eyes, unwavering, as she spoke matter-of-factly of Charles Manson. Dressed in a hooded red gown, she could have been an older, deranged Little Red Riding Hood from Into the Woods. (But her wig was far too clean and blow-dried for Fromme’s scraggly hair.)

Shuler Hensley offered a gentler-than-usual Czolgosz, with a trace of an accent and a look of bewilderment, as if asking himself, “How did I get here?” Though Clark looked nothing like the real-life Moore, her comic delivery was impeccable, especially while being romanced by Charles Guiteau (John Ellison Conlee), cheerful as ever and here a vaudevillian unfazed by the noose dangling before him from the grid. Ethan Lipton as the Proprietor, in his brown suit and black bow tie, looked like a milquetoast, insinuating rather than menacing.

Ensemble members in smaller roles also gave noteworthy performances. Pearl Sun’s Emma Goldman was young and attractive; it was easy to see why Czolgosz would fall in love with her, and not just for her politics. In a stumble-on as Gerald Ford, Damian Baldet looked to his Secret Service agents for confirmation that he was president. Ten-year-old Hudson Loverro (A Bronx Tale) deserves special mention for his priceless reaction and comic timing as Moore’s son.

From time to time, the black void gave way to a sort of celestial diner, with booths rolled on and off and the Proprietor serving. The banquettes doubled as park benches and Sam Byck’s car. Only in the climactic scene, in which the assassins exhort Lee Harvey Oswald (Cory Michael Smith) to join them and make his mark on history, did the stage explode into color when the black curtains became an eight-panel screen of a frame from the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

Under Chris Fenwick’s musical direction, Sondheim’s score sounded nothing short of electrifying. (How could someone behind me have been snoring?) Lorin Latarro’s choreography relied on natural-looking movement, except for a jarring, repetitious right-shoulder-forward that came across like a pickup move in a bar.

The last widely reported attempt on a president’s life was Hinckley’s on Reagan in 1981, but the point of Assassins is citizen anger, not actual bullets fired. At the Balladeer’s line “Every now and then the country goes a little wrong,” New York Times critic Jesse Green reported, “applause stopped the show for perhaps 20 seconds.” Two nights later, it was the line that follows: “Every now and then a madman’s bound to come along.” (The audience should have been keenly aware that City Center is a mere two blocks from the Trump Tower.)

In a chilling final image, as the assassins took their shots at immortality, so did young Loverro. Like too many children in real life, he had picked up a gun. As it went off, his face simultaneously registered both shock and awe at its power — and, suddenly, his own.

DIANE NOTTLE is a New York-based writer on the arts, language and travel. She was an editor at The New York Times for 20 years, specializing in cultural news.

Sondheim on Sondheim was performed at Tanglewood on July 8, 2017. PHOTO BY DIANE NOTTLE

“God” wasn’t there, though Stephen Sondheim was. Neither were “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” “Now You Know,” “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs” and other staples of the Roundabout Theater Company’s 2010 Sondheim on Sondheim on Broadway.

In fact, the concert version presented on July 8, 2018, at Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Lenox, Mass., felt abbreviated in more ways than one. Though the running order of James Lapine’s original conception remained roughly the same, both the show as a whole, directed by his daughter Sarna Lapine (who staged the recent limited Broadway run of Sunday in the Park with George), and individual songs seemed truncated, perhaps to keep the running time to a brisk two hours, including intermission. But there were also some entertaining additions.

Keith Lockhart, Boston Pops Music Director. PHOTO BY MARCO BORGGREVE

For Sondheim aficionados, the Boston Pops version, conducted by Keith Lockhart with David Loud (credited as musical director) on piano and keyboard, covered familiar ground. For newcomers and casual listeners, it served as a Cliffs Notes of Sondheim’s career, giving the highlights but by no means encyclopedic. No matter. The 5,000-seat Koussevitsky Music Shed was nearly full, and an afternoon of drenching rain didn’t deter a healthy lawn crowd from picnicking, many on tarps. No doubt the BSO Pension Fund, for which the evening was a benefit, was grateful. And one for Mahler? His Fourth Symphony the next day drew a far smaller crowd.

As on Broadway, videos and still photos of Sondheim were projected on a screen above the orchestra, telling the story of his life and work in his own words and voice, from his unique perspective. Reminiscing about knocking on doors in the 1950s, he made getting his big break as lyricist of West Side Story sound so easy. “Epiphany” was broken in two by his video explaining Sweeney Todd’s shifting moods.

The cast of eight consisted of four seasoned performers and four vocal fellows from the Tanglewood Music Center: Katherine Beck, Daniel McGrew, Fotina Naumenko and William Socoloff. (A starrier cast at the Hollywood Bowl on July 23 includes Matthew Morrison, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Jonathan Groff.)

If opera is the bass-baritone Phillip Boykin’s comfort zone, he easily transcended it. He started the split “Epiphany” sitting almost too calmly on a stool, then picked it up after Sondheim’s commentary with a vehemence befitting the character. While equally intense as Czolgosz in “The Gun Song” from Assassins — one of the evening’s most fully realized numbers, with Boykin nimbly handing it off to ensemble members — he also showed a comic side as the producer in “Opening Doors” (“There’s not a tune you can hum …”).

Ruthie Ann Miles, the onetime usher who won a Tony Award last year as Lady Thiang in The King and I, brought a joyful presence to the evening. Having infused “Take Me to the World” with a palpable hunger for life, she seamlessly segued from the TV interviewer in “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” (sung with panache by Gabriel Ebert, himself a Tony winner for Matilda, as Charley to McGrew’s shamefaced Frank) into a slow, dreamy “Good Thing Going.” In “Beautiful,” from Sunday, she rendered the lyric “You make it beautiful” not as a statement, but as a command.

Carmen Cusack (Sunday at New York City Center) was equally convincing as a 1950s Brooklyn girl in “So Many People,” Fosca in “I Read” and “Loving You,” and Sally in “In Buddy’s Eyes.” In a mash-up of “Losing My Mind” and “Not a Day Goes By,” she and Miles conveyed all the anguish of the characters in both songs.

“Best Thing That Ever Happened” (not to be confused with “Best Thing That Ever Could Have Happened,” from Merrily We Roll Along) put the straight (Bounce) and gay (Road Show) versions side by side; for those who have always liked the character of Nellie in Bounce, it was nice to hear her pragmatism and profanity from Naumenko. But that second-act number seemed tame in comparison with the first-act-curtain medley of “Happiness,” “Ever After,” “A Weekend in the Country” and ”Sunday,” which quickly morphed from a duet for one heterosexual couple into a comic “La Ronde” of sexual pairings.

The visuals designed by Peter Flaherty, marred only by a brief freeze at the top of Act II, effectively mixed video, still photos and GIFs to keep the storyline moving. While the clip from “Passione d’Amore” felt a little too close to Tanglewood’s annual Film Night, the projections included some clever touches: the trees with white leaves for “Weekend” that turned pointill-esque colors for Sunday; a “Send In the Clowns” montage with one line each by singers including Glynis Johns, Frank Sinatra, Patti LaBelle, Judy Collins, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand and Judi Dench; assassins and their victims, not limited to the ones in the show, but also Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, two Gandhis (Mahatma and Indira) and Benazir Bhutto. Among the vintage stills, perhaps none was more poignant than the one from Company of Sondheim apparently giving notes to just a sliver of Beth Howland’s face, looking every bit as perplexed as her character, Amy.

Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass., summer home of the Boston Symphony and Pops Orchestras. PHOTO BY STU ROSNER

Just as good as the projections was the staging of Sunday: good when two singers were handed parasols, even better when they and the rest of the cast assumed the poses of the figures on the Grand Jatte.

The show ended with a double finale: a medley of “Company” and “Old Friends,” with head shots of Sondheim’s friends, mentors and collaborators filling the screen, followed by the ever-wistful “Anyone Can Whistle,” accompanied by what sounded almost like a toy piano. For all the evening’s sophistication — and Sondheim’s — it ended with the essence of any classic: simplicity.

No show in the annals of the American musical theater has risen so promisingly, crashed so quickly and become such an iconic work as Merrily We Roll Along — Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s 1981 show directed by Harold Prince. How did the team of Sondheim and Prince, collaborators on five groundbreaking musicals in the 1970s, go so wrong on this one? Or did they? Sondheim’s score is as exquisitely crafted as any in his canon, and Merrily has received numerous successful productions in revised versions.

For the young cast of the 1981 production, the experience was exhilarating and wrenching, as is Lonny Price’s engrossing documentary, Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, which chronicles the process leading up to the show’s opening and swift closing (16 performances) and the impact it continues to exert on its original participants.

Price has a unique perspective on the Merrily saga. He was cast in the first production as Charley Kringas, the optimistic-turned-cynical playwright (or cynical-turned-optimistic playwright, since the musical, like its source, the 1934 Kaufman-Hart play of the same name, wends its way backward). To work on Broadway — with Sondheim and Prince, no less — was a veritable dream come true for the then 22-year-old, who’d been so smitten with the team’s creations in the early 1970s that he invested his Bar Mitzvah money in the original production of Pacific Overtures.

He also invested what appears to have been his emotional core in Merrily, which is heartbreakingly evident as Best Worst Thing unfolds from the discovery of extraordinary archival footage of interviews, readings, auditions and rehearsals through the challenging preview period, opening and closing.

Deftly edited and paced, the documentary is a loving balancing act between euphoria and anguish. A dessert birthday party at Price’s apartment before rehearsals began includes an impromptu performance by Sondheim playing and singing “Good Thing Going.” (We see the music and lyrics: “Going, Going, Gone,” underlining something we already know will occur.)

But even theatrical gods don’t know when disaster will strike. Nearly 35 years after the show closed, Hal Prince says he was never happier than during Merrily rehearsals, which he thought would be a big success. Were his decisions to cast inexperienced actors (aged 16-25) and put them in T-shirts misguided? Was the present-to-past narrative too confusing for audiences to follow? Replacing a leading actor (James Weissenbach, whose role of Franklin Shepard was assumed by Jim Walton) and the choreographer (Ron Field with Larry Fuller, a change not mentioned in the documentary) couldn’t alter the show’s fate.

Price, who would go on to become a successful director, portrays the Merrily experience and its aftermath without any inclination toward objectivity. He is shown in home movies as a youngster wanting nothing more than to be onstage. He wipes away tears as he watches himself on an audition interview for Merrily and quietly concurs that he likes the person he was.

The aura becomes almost mystical whenever elegiac music accompanies the camera panning across an empty Alvin Theatre (now the Neil Simon), where Merrily so briefly resided. The joy, anticipation and anxiety everyone felt are evident as the young actors rehearse with unflagging fervor, the creative team makes multitudes of changes and the expected triumph never happens. Frank Rich, a longtime champion of Sondheim-Prince musicals, says he found it painful to write his negative review in The New York Times.

The cast managed one act of defiance — making the magnificent original cast album the day after the show closed — before going on with their lives. Most of the players never again appeared on Broadway. Only one cast member, Jason Alexander, achieved fame, as George Costanza on the hit TV show Seinfeld, while the rest continued trying their luck in show business or enter unrelated fields. Sondheim and Prince parted ways and found success with other collaborators, until reuniting for Bounce in 2003.

Price followed up on the 1981 events more than three decades later by visiting cast members who had leading roles in the original production. Ann Morrison (Mary Flynn) teaches theater to people with special needs in Florida; Terry Finn (Gussie) has appeared in TV shows and films; Abby Pogrebin (Evelyn) has had a successful career as journalist, TV producer and author; Walton (Franklin) is a Broadway veteran.

The significance of Merrily in all of these people’s lives is reinforced overtly and subtly. Upon returning to the empty Neil Simon Theatre, a group of the original actors gathers around an upright piano and clutch one another while Walton performs “Growing Up,” which was added to the show in 1985.

If that packs a wallop, just wait. As the closing credits roll, we hear Walton — this time from the original cast album — singing the show’s most haunting song. For Price and company, the bittersweet lyrics sum up everlasting feelings:

Not a day goes by,Not a single dayBut you’re somewhere a part of my life,And it looks like you’ll stay.

DONALD ROSENBERG is author of The Cleveland Orchestra Story: “Second to None” and editor of EMAg, the magazine of Early Music America.

In the wake of the most recent election cycle, there seems to be “another national anthem” playing for many disenfranchised and marginalized Americans. If only for that reason, Yale Rep’s spring production of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins (March 17-April 8, 2017) was not only timely but also troubling. However, James Bundy’s production went far beyond timeliness. Indeed, Bundy and his company crafted their production with exceptional narrative and thematic clarity, relying on the words, music and an unsettlingly contemporary subject, rather than a showy or revisionist production concept, to relay how easily the American Dream — or myth — can be misinterpreted by a few to the detriment of all.

Much of that clarity derived from Bundy’s brisk, spare staging. An upstage wall of stadium lights resonated with the idea in Sondheim’s lyrics that this ragtag collection of American misfits is trying to get into “the ballpark,” where their dissonant version of a national anthem is being played — they hope. Above the stage hung an ominously tilted screen, sometimes projecting the lower half of the American flag, sometimes reflecting visages of the presidential victims, sometimes gleefully, sometimes terrifyingly depicting narrated events, perhaps most disturbingly in its use of the Zapruder film of John Kennedy’s assassination in Texas.

A pair of LED screens on each side of the proscenium served a similar purpose, providing images and ironic commentary on otherwise tricky dramatic moments. When Charles Guiteau, James Garfield’s assassin, played winningly as a grinning but determined lunatic by Stephen DeRosa, made his way to the top of the pillory, noose around his neck, and the hangman pulled a lever, the lights dropped out and an animated silhouette of the resultant hanging appeared. The screens also showed recreations of historical newspaper headlines and other atmospheric, period-specific images. In addition to being an effective way to dramatize events that might be difficult to stage, the screens relieved the director from having to fill the stage with anything other than the most basic of set pieces: some chairs, a table, a few boxes of books, all moved easily and quickly on- and offstage. The result did not seem like a “stripped-down” staging. Rather, it allowed the characters and the stories to remain the focus of the often grim, sometimes riotous, proceedings.

In fact, this production emphasized, even reveled, in that uneasy, sometimes disturbing co-existence of comic mayhem and spiritual angst in the midst of the long, dark night of the national soul. Much criticism of the original production and its Broadway revival derived from what some critics felt was an inappropriate, even disrespectful attempt to blend the two. This production embraced that tonal dichotomy to full effect. While much explosive laughter was honestly earned, especially in the performances of Lauren Molina as an obsessive-compulsive Squeaky Fromme and Julia Murney as a bi-polar Sara Jane Moore, much laughter in other scenes was clearly troubled. When Fred Inkley, as the funniest Gerald Ford since Chevy Chase, tripped and fell amid the bullets spilled on the ground that were intended for him, the audience roared. When Lucas Dixon’s lumpish, dour John Hinckley asked Dylan Frederick’s evasive Lee Harvey Oswald for an autograph, the initial burst of laughter seemed to choke on growing lumps in audience members’ throats.

Only one of several scenes in which the grotesque nature of the action was amplified even as it was played for laughs, this climactic scene focused on Oswald perhaps most successfully demonstrated the validity of Bundy’s interpretation. The subject matter was best served by embracing the tonal discrepancy between horror and humor, rather than trying to blunt the edge of either or mask the growing horror with distracting effects, set pieces or conceptual impositions.

Despite the fragmentary nature of the show — no literal narrative exists except for the impressionistic, non-linear layering of historical events to provide a recognizable link among the dissatisfied American dreamers at its center — Bundy relied on a handful of effective staging ideas to create cohesiveness from seeming chaos. The character of the shooting gallery Proprietor, played with knowing menace by Austin Durant, was a constant presence, handing Hinckley a guitar, pulling the switch to electrocute Giuseppe Zangara (sung with astonishing diction by Stanley Bahorek), handing a bottle to P.J. Griffith’s bitter, melancholy Leon Czolgosz of, and finally throttling the preening Balladeer in “Another National Anthem,” after the assassins, newly bonded and empowered across the ages, first ignored and then threatened the singer. As such, the “Proprietor” created coherence to the evening’s proceedings, just as the vainglorious John Wilkes Booth, played by Robert Lenzi, crafted cohesiveness among his cache of diffuse, desperate dreamers.

The omnipresence of the off-kilter American flag looming above the action added a degree of scenic unity to an otherwise bare stage. Bundy’s choices to allow the words and music to resonate, unencumbered by any disruptively oppressive directorial concept, indicated his trust in the material and in his performers, both of which were rewarded.

While the titular assassins may have lived lives of quiet desperation — at least until their final, desperate acts — Assassins itself speaks loudly to the wounded spirit of a nation — any nation — that finds itself at war between its vision of itself and its disappointing reality. Yale Rep’s production confronted that cognitive disconnect stirringly, confident in the troubling, contemporary nature of the subject matter, as well as the elements of the theatrical event itself that conveyed the cautionary tale of what happens when a citizenry loses sight of and confidence in the promises of its leaders.

In his notes, director James Bundy described how the audience could see the assassins reflected in contemporary media. Perhaps that is the most telling statement of why this production struck such a resonant, if dissonant, chord: It forced the audience to look at itself through a very clear glass, darkly and knowingly.

DONALD P. GAGNON isan associate professor of English at Western Connecticut State University.